OK, for accuracy's sake, it seems about two and a half percent (paywall) of us are actually able to multitask effectively. Unfortunately, the odds are not good that you are among that minority. A lot of multitasking research seems to look at trying to do something else while driving. This is perhaps unsurprising: you're much more likely to kill someone texting and driving than juggling multiple applications and windows at your desk (with the possible exception of armed drone pilots). Still, many of us choose to ignore the data and continue to use our phones while controlling thousands of pounds of metal. Given that this is the case, Sarah Donohue at Duke University and her colleagues set out to ask, "are there any specific groups out there that can multitask?" They set their eyes on gamers.

A lot of prior research has shown that avid players of action games tend to have greater visual acuity, contrast sensitivity, better ability to track multiple moving objects, and possibly better top-down cognitive control compared to those of us who haven't racked up the hours, weeks, and months in Counterstrike/Doom/Call of Duty. Donohue's study, published online last week in the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, aimed to find out if action game devotees could use those abilities to effectively multitask better than the rest of us.

There were three components to the experiment: a multiple-object tracking test, an image search, and a driving game where participants were scored on their speed and the number of walls and obstacles hit. Each component was conducted on its own (single task), and also while the participants were being asked trivia questions which they had to answer within five seconds (dual task). The participants were grouped into gamers and non-gamers. Gamers were defined as people actively playing FPS shooters for approximately three hours/week for the past six months, and playing at least five hours/week at some point, while rating themselves average or above. So what did they find?

First off, being asked rapid-fire questions from Trivial Pursuit significantly decreased one's ability in all three tasks (with a couple of caveats). In the driving test, being asked trivia questions resulted in an increase in the time taken to complete the course, although it also saw a decrease in the number of driving errors. It also decreased the accuracy of tracking multiple objects, and caused participants to find fewer objects in the image search. Ultimately, when comparing gamers with non-gamers, nothing stood out. The gamers did not perform any better or worse at the dual task tests.

The decrease in driving errors in the dual task driving test is somewhat surprising, and the authors note that it was unexpected. However, they point out the test was "designed more to keep participants engaged in the dual task rather than to mimic a phone conversation."

3-5+ hours a week? That is nothing. Competitive level gamers have to treat it as a full time to job to be really good. Even then, it is not really about multitasking. It is situation awareness, precision, and decision making that make a good gamer, or good anything for that matter. This of course varies from individual to individual though. We humans are like single core CPUs, the best are just good at predicting and weaving all the external factors into one thread. If you force us run two threads simultaneously, one has to sleep while we work on the other.

When I was still competing actively in tournaments, I could easily spend 3-5 hours in one sitting and up to 12+ hours a day. Most of the time a hefty layer of training is what is making the difference. Also when you stop practicing or practice less, you can actively feel yourself losing your edge. Better gamers might have turned out different results, but in my experience poor gamers (with poor situation awareness and critical thinking skills) are far more common. If you give them a couple hundred hours training to play Trivial Pursuit while driving first, and I can guarantee that anyone would get better. I don't know where this idea that gamers are better multi-taskers came from. Good multi-taskers are just good multi-taskers.

There are several studies out that difinitively prove the human brain is hard-wired to only perform a single task at a time. It is not hard-wired for true multi-tasking in the sense that most people think they achieve regularly.

The perception is that people CAN multi-task when in fact the human brain is simply really good at jumping back and forth from one task to another really fast. BUT it is stil only 1 task at a time.

Gamers probably just do it perceptibly quicker than non-gamers.

As for gamers - paying attention to multiple tasks or objects on screen - that is simply an itemized list of familiar objects that after a certain amount of time playing a given game they have memorzied and the information is readily available. As opposed to jumping abck into that same game 10 years later and having to pull recall form long-term memory.

Quote:

In the driving test, being asked trivia questions resulted in an increase in the time taken to complete the course, although it also saw a decrease in the number of driving errors.

This was probably flawed anyway - seeing as how nearly ANY artifical driving experience I've ever come across - never truely perfoms like driving in the real world. AND every driving simulation is different form the next one - so unless they had some time to acclimate to the driving before the actual test phase - then their results will be flawed as well.

You know this when you drive another car (rental - friend's - etc...) that is not your daily driver and it takes you some time to get sued to driving it - as it is different from what you are used to.

There's a difference between how intensive tasks are... and it that can vary for tasks over time. Driving is one with high variability...If you've driven on the highway where you're staring at the same tree for 45 minutes it does not take the same mental focus as driving in any major cities' rush hour or driving in residential areas. If you think I can not juggle while driving 75 MPH on a highway that doesn't bend/turn or signficantly inclines/declines for the next 250 miles or I can juggle while driving 75 MPH in bumper to bumper traffic without incident, you're being intentionally ignorant. So, let's study texting while driving, with no signficant environmental changes vs texting while driving with signficant envionmental changes.. I bet I could guess which one ends up having significant issues with crashes.....I bet there are differences in what senses/motor functions the tasks require as well, and the ones that use the same senses or motor functions, multitaskers would do worse... which do you think is more likely to result in a spill, watching TV while pouring a glass of water, or listening to the radio while pouring a glass of water....

I hate the obsession with multitasking. It's basically not possible, yet everyone seems to believe that they're good at it.

I'm pretty sure that when we find out that aliens have infiltrated our society we'll be able to easily pick them out, they'll be the ones who don't think they're good at something they're really not. The number of gamers, drivers, chefs, martial artists, hardcore drinkers, etc I've met in my life is astonishing, but in reality we're so crap that it takes years and years of dedicated work and some genetic luck to train our reluctant brains to do one full activity reasonably well. And even then it doesn't always work.

masterbinky wrote:

Driving is one with high variability...If you've driven on the highway where you're staring at the same tree for 45 minutes...

There is a pretty good chance you've hit that tree and should probably call for help

I think the word "multitasking" is used in different ways. For some true multitasking means being able to perform multiple tasks at the exact same time, a feat that is probably only achievable by that 2.5%. However, there is another, weaker form of multitasking that is arguably more important--being able to rapidly juggle between many tasks. I think that in many real world situations it is more important to be able to rapidly engage and disengage attention between tasks and also to be able to effectively prioritize them. Anyone who's played a demanding RTS game (e.g. Starcraft) will have practiced this skill extensively. I'd be interested in seeing whether top Starcraft players like Bisu and Jaedong are better than average at multitasking tasks of this nature.

It's been explained to me that the human brain really can't multitask but is pretty good when it comes to switching back and forth between tasks rapidly. The cool thing is that this study investigates a similar question to an article published a couple months ago in the same journal titled "Action video game experience reduces the cost of switching tasks" by Mathew Cain, et al, except that Cain's ventures into the discussion of switching tasks and not the vague concept of human brain multitasking. They tracked the efficiency of switching tasks with the understanding that "true" multitasking is improbable for humans anyway and found that gamers that play 7+ hours a week of FPSs are faster at switching tasks based on their study method using light stimuli and participant keystroke response. As another part of their experiment they tried to test whether gamers are better at filtering out distractions and found that gamers are just as bad as everyone else is at ignoring visual distractors. Bad news for gamers, I guess, but good news for their girlfriends.

Why would they use FPS as their target genre? That indicates that the researchers are ignorant of what actually goes on in games, since shooters don't really require multi-tasking. Checking to see if FPS players can multi-task better is like seeing if people who regularly play basketball or soccer are better at multi-tasking.

I'd like to see this study repeated with professional Starcraft 2 players.

edit: I'd also like to point out that prior to the advent of multi-core machines, our computers didn't do 'true' multi-tasking either; they just switched between tasks really, really quickly.

This is a poor study. A better study would have been to directly test the ability to train people to multitask while driving. I suggest starting with a pool of police officers who drive, talk, and punch license plates into a computer at the same time.

It's not about multitasking, it's about task prioritization. When I'm talking on the phone and driving, even with hands free, I often pause and even outright ignore the person on the other end of the phone and have to ask them to repeat themselves. I give the vast majority of my attention to driving, and only a small spare amount to the conversation. Usually, that is enough, but in demanding circumstances (say, merging onto a busy highway) I pretty much ignore anything coming out of the phone.

These tests are not measuring the right thing. Measure prioritization, not multitasking. THAT would be something very interesting and actually contribute something useful to the discussion, and would probably really advance driver training.

These multi-tasking tests usually negate practice, ask me trivia questions while I'm blowing people's heads off and see if my performance suffers. Tailor the tests to one activity the person does routinely and evaluate performance, or two activities someone does routinely.

Additionally, many multi-tasking studies involve direct sensory conflict. Is texting while driving all that dangerous if you can text without looking at your phone? Especially since you can pause the texting when it's time to react.

I find the focus on FPS players to be a bit odd, Sure some of them FPS's require teamplay skills. but i'm sure there are other games out there that's better suited for training multitasking. RTS being one option, mmorpg's like wow might be another, atleast if you are a playing a mezz class, or healer. But I'll put that down to mostly spacial awareness. Being able to track multiple goings on, is not the same as being able to do multiple things at the same time.

One other thing seemed odd, " However, they point out the test was "designed more to keep participants engaged in the dual task rather than to mimic a phone conversation.""Maybe they should go back and redefine what they call multitasking, because talking one the phone while driving is probably going to be one of the more common things people think of when they hear multitasking. Not to mention it might be a more practical angle for their research.

And finaly as anyone who isn't a gamer might recognise, gamers are usualy realy focused on the game. try asking some TP questions to someone deep into a FPS match and you're likely to not get an answer at all.

It isn't the 'holding the phone' that's a distraction. It's the talking to it part.

Which... actually implies banning carpools.

Actually holding it is a third task. As you have to consider adjusting the distance of the phone to your ear and mouth (no matter how minute of change) while in motion, watching the road and driving and talking as well.

Add in that these people also will be the type to juggle in a cigarette, cup of coffee and possibly makeup in a vanity mirror...

It isn't the 'holding the phone' that's a distraction. It's the talking to it part.

Which... actually implies banning carpools.

I went on a defensive driving course recently where they explained that it's not the talking per se, it's trying to carry on a conversation with someone who isn't there. Because of the hugely reduced communication bandwidth - you only have a degraded voice signal, not all the nonverbal cues which make up a large amount of speech - a phone conversation uses a different part of the brain than talking to the person next to you, and requires much more concentration.

The other thing is that passengers (even kids, to an extent) tend to shut up when something important is happening around you, whereas people on the phone don't. Next time you're driving and talking to a passenger, notice how often you pause or say 'er' or 'um' as your brain detaches from talking to focus on not hitting that cyclist or remembering the speed limit or suchlike. It's way more than in normal speech.

In the UK there hasn't been a single fatal (not to the driver, obviously) accident where a driver who'd been on the phone hasn't gone to prison. It's not, strictly speaking, illegal to use your phone and drive, but it's so distracting that the police impound your phone as soon as they arrive on scene and will charge you with either Reckless Driving or sometimes even manslaughter.

Don't even get me started on the idiots who think texting/tweeting/facebooking/etc while driving isn't massively dangerous. Fun game, if one of them is behind you are some traffic lights, put the handbrake on and apply/release the footbrake to make your brake lights go on and off - the light changing in their peripheral vision is enough to make them look up, then they notice the traffic light is still red and look back down at their phones. Time it right and you can get them to bob their heads up and down like a confused chicken.

I'm in agreement with the majority of comments here. We don't multitask, but we shift from task to task very quickly as to appear that we are. The test is poorly designed. Back when I still read pulp-based magazines, I would juggle reading articles while watching TV. I could devote just enough attention to the TV every few seconds to know when the ads ended so I could save my place in the article and resume the program.

If you're playing FPS's 3 hours a week you are not a gamer, you are a sadist. I find even starting a FPS a couple weeks after launch is an unenjoyable and disorienting experience as I try to get into the groove. Putting yourself through that kind of pain but not putting in enough time to get better is just stupid.

Make the experimental group 3-5 hours a night and the result (positive or negative) would be interesting.

The increase in driving ability can be explained quite simply - when they're texting, they know they shouldn't do it so they become more law-abiding. They'll slow down because they know they can't react as fast, and that means they have a lot more time to react. They know it's impossible to keep up with traffic and multitask, so they don't try, and end up being erratic.

Of course, anyone who's stuck behind them in rush hour traffic knows what a hazard they are to other road users - besides going slower (and forcing everyone to overtake - a dangerous maneuver, or to switch langes unnecessarily), they also stop suddenly, accellerate erratically, etc.

By themselves, they are safer. But in traffic, they endanger everyone else because their erratic driving forces everyone else to compensate. And yes, it's pretty obvious when someone is using their cell on the road.

If you're playing FPS's 3 hours a week you are not a gamer, you are a sadist. I find even starting a FPS a couple weeks after launch is an unenjoyable and disorienting experience as I try to get into the groove. Putting yourself through that kind of pain but not putting in enough time to get better is just stupid.

Make the experimental group 3-5 hours a night and the result (positive or negative) would be interesting.

I don't play FPSs but I do play 3-5 hours a night on games in MMORPG, Strategy, RPG games (Not all at once).

It's not about multitasking, it's about task prioritization. When I'm talking on the phone and driving, even with hands free, I often pause and even outright ignore the person on the other end of the phone and have to ask them to repeat themselves. I give the vast majority of my attention to driving, and only a small spare amount to the conversation. Usually, that is enough, but in demanding circumstances (say, merging onto a busy highway) I pretty much ignore anything coming out of the phone.

These tests are not measuring the right thing. Measure prioritization, not multitasking. THAT would be something very interesting and actually contribute something useful to the discussion, and would probably really advance driver training.

Well, personally, in my experience most people can't prioritize that well, either -- at least, not if one of the tasks is an involving conversation with someone, and especially with someone who's on the phone, rather than physically present and able to adjust their side of the conversation to the circumstances.

These multi-tasking tests usually negate practice, ask me trivia questions while I'm blowing people's heads off and see if my performance suffers. Tailor the tests to one activity the person does routinely and evaluate performance, or two activities someone does routinely.

Additionally, many multi-tasking studies involve direct sensory conflict. Is texting while driving all that dangerous if you can text without looking at your phone? Especially since you can pause the texting when it's time to react.

This reminds of the old joke about the "absent-minded professor" who boiled his watch and put the egg in his pocket.

It isn't the 'holding the phone' that's a distraction. It's the talking to it part.

Which... actually implies banning carpools.

Actually holding it is a third task. As you have to consider adjusting the distance of the phone to your ear and mouth (no matter how minute of change) while in motion, watching the road and driving and talking as well.

Add in that these people also will be the type to juggle in a cigarette, cup of coffee and possibly makeup in a vanity mirror...

I have heard of studies that seem to show that "hands free" cellphone use while driving is actually more detrimental, as users of "hands free" phones or more prone to underestimate the distraction, while drivers with a regular cellphone are more conscious of and compensate more appropriately for the distraction involved.

I have no idea how well those studies held up, but I do have the distinct impression that a large part of the push for "hands free" was/is from people just wanting to believe that the "common sense" adoption of "hands free" approaches (and even legislation) would just have to make us all safer.

The increase in driving ability can be explained quite simply - when they're texting, they know they shouldn't do it so they become more law-abiding. They'll slow down because they know they can't react as fast, and that means they have a lot more time to react. They know it's impossible to keep up with traffic and multitask, so they don't try, and end up being erratic.

Of course, anyone who's stuck behind them in rush hour traffic knows what a hazard they are to other road users - besides going slower (and forcing everyone to overtake - a dangerous maneuver, or to switch langes unnecessarily), they also stop suddenly, accellerate erratically, etc.

By themselves, they are safer. But in traffic, they endanger everyone else because their erratic driving forces everyone else to compensate. And yes, it's pretty obvious when someone is using their cell on the road.

I think multi-tasking means different things to different people. To some it's being able to walk and chew gum at the same time. For others, it's applying makeup or doing something else dumb while driving.

For me it's the ability to handle multiple analytic tasks at the same time....and that, despite my best efforts is really hard to multi-task. I can keep the programs open....write a piece of code for one project, submit it, and switch gears and tend to something else, but truly working in parallel...that never happens.

This is a poor study. A better study would have been to directly test the ability to train people to multitask while driving. I suggest starting with a pool of police officers who drive, talk, and punch license plates into a computer at the same time.

Sounds like a rantful post. I agree though that many brag and think they can do it, while they are the causes of accidents but what I don't understand is.... "lose the headset"? Your telling me not to use the recommended use of BT headsets? Might as well ban car stereos and window switches. I think that test is absolutely inaccurate, the people who joined the test, the practice tests used and if it really ever happened accurately, this so called "test" would also mean that F1 pilots using the digital wheel or Military pilots with the most technical instrumentation found today together with space ships won't be able to. Lose the make-up, cell phone talk, texting and burger eating habit, now we can agree on that. Perhaps your good at it?

I don't know about anything else but when driving keeping the eyes on the road is quite important, even if you could effectively multitask I wouldn't want you to do anything that required you to take the eyes away...

Personally I prefer to not even try to do several things at once, if you focus on completing one thing at a time before moving on to the next the overall time to complete things tend to be shorter.

The only kind of multitasking I do is on the level of listening to the radio while driving, those use different senses though and not much thought is needed on how to actually drive the car. Not getting bored while driving actually helps to keep focus but I do end up with wierd visual associations sometimes (like every time I drive past a specific place on the road I remember something that was said on the radio when I previously drove past there)

Sounds like a rantful post. I agree though that many brag and think they can do it, while they are the causes of accidents but what I don't understand is.... "lose the headset"? Your telling me not to use the recommended use of BT headsets? Might as well ban car stereos and window switches. I think that test is absolutely inaccurate, the people who joined the test, the practice tests used and if it really ever happened accurately, this so called "test" would also mean that F1 pilots using the digital wheel or Military pilots with the most technical instrumentation found today together with space ships won't be able to. Lose the make-up, cell phone talk, texting and burger eating habit, now we can agree on that. Perhaps your good at it?

Are fighter pilots still turning off every thing they can so they can concentrate on what they're supposed to be doing without all the high-tech distractions?

You'd think that fighter-pilots would tend to be better than average at multi-tasking...